What GAME ARTICLES/REVIEWS are you WRITING?

*utter indifference towards MCU high five*

charlest wrote: I wrote about my apathy towards the MCU,

Amen, brother. Don't get me wrong -- Marvel knows how to tell a story. But I am seriously overcooked on the superhero genre.

This is funny because the crux of the article is my complete turnaround. Fueled by my surprising enjoyment of Wandavision and my daughter cottoning on to the mythology, I learned how to enjoy and appreciate this weird thing that's gripped our culture.

This is paralleled by my initial frustration with the game but I similarly have a breakthrough and find that spark.

It's sort of the reverse of a coming of age tale, a crotchety film snob finding youth.

This review paralleled my experience a lot -- I was initially indifferent to the MCU having not been a huge comic fan as a kid (just Spiderman). However, as my son as started to watch the movies, I've seen them through a new light and have been enjoying them quite a bit.

As I mentioned on twitter, I thought the Ferox analogy was really good. I enjoy the minis game -- the little guy needs to be just a bit older, but I imagine that he will be into it quite a bit. They have done a great job of making it "feel" like an MCU movie -- lot's of action, but swings....movie-esque moves, etc.

charlest wrote: This is funny because the crux of the article is my complete turnaround. Fueled by my surprising enjoyment of Wandavision and my daughter cottoning on to the mythology, I learned how to enjoy and appreciate this weird thing that's gripped our culture.

Yeah, I'm more with early in the article charlest

Marvel Comics were an important part of my childhood, and I didn't lose interest until my mid-20s. But I passed on a large majority of the MCU movies when they were in the theater, because many of my past experiences with superhero movies were disappointing. Black Panther and the third Thor movie changed my mind, and now I have the complete run on DVD. Charlest, I really enjoyed your review of Marvel Crisis Protocol, but that price tag is still a dealbreaker for me.

I've been busy lately. My first work at Polygon was published yesterday, a review of Corey Konieczka's The Initiative: www.polygon.com/reviews/22391906/the-ini...-review-spoiler-free

There are some comments in the review that some would call spoilers, so do not read it if that will bother you.


And yeah Shell - I would urge most to stay away from MCP because the cost is just so ridiculous. I know Marvel: Champions isn't terribly cheap once you start adding up all of the expansions (hell almost nothing in our hobby is cheap anymore), but I think MCP is in its own arena of cost.

Today I wrote a controversial article on game reviews. It's getting downvoted as hell on Reddit so it seems something you might enjoy thinking about:

Why price is rarely a factor in my reviews

I don't always agree with you, but I agree with you 1000% here. For sure list the price somewhere or a link to the MSRP. But the meaning of money is completely conditional to the person reading the review.

'In the digital realm, value is conflated with length.'
So much this.

Same thing happened to Dan Thurot a few weeks back. I think part of the problem is a conflation of review and criticism, buying guide and analysis. The differences are a little fuzzy, but both have their place. However, there is a surfeit of the former and a dearth of the latter in our hobby, and the type of people who downvote this seem to want everything to be a buying guide.

I don’t get it. When Thurot covers stuff like Meltwater or White Tribe or Shores of Tripoli, he doesn’t make me want to buy them but I still read him because I appreciate his thoughts on the particular historical simulation or questioning the place of a determinist ending in a historical recreation. A lot of those Hollandspiele games don’t even sound fun to play, but Thurot makes me glad they exist.

We don’t need to own or even play these games for them to have value, but buyers’ guides struggle to understand this and discussing value for cost adds nothing to the conversation.

Totally agree. It's a certain sort of privilege, but "cost" is about fourth on my list of "to buy" questions. It's absolutely dwarfed by "interest", and really even secondary to "storage space".

"Heads up, this is a rare boutique thing" is good to know, but if I want the MSRP of a game I've never had trouble finding it. Getting me to even look for it is what I want out of a critical review.

Tell me why I might want it, especially in a frame of reference to other things I understand (or don't, yet!), and I'll make my own choice about the relative value.

edit on further thought:

And actually, the "cost of game" or "cost per pound/mini/token" is about the shittiest metric I can imagine for games. When I buy a game, I'm interested in what the designer is doing. I like games that look nice (and so artists should get paid too), but ultimately I'm not buying a box of toys, I'm buying an idea that someone (hopefully) spent a lot of time and effort on. Measuring that against "similar games at the same price point" is a travesty, and only matters if you're bulk buying. It turns out that I'm not.

I can accept people wanting a cost or value in a review. I think its worthless information but I can accept that some people feel that information would be nice to know or even commented on. They are wrong for a variety of reasons but whatever.

What i don't understand is how apparently impossible it is for such people to
a) look it up if it's not provided
b) use the info in the review to make a judgement about how much they think it might be worth.

If they are incapable of doing such things.... I... well, I worry.

I also don't understand how such people can't see that putting pricing or commentary on cost doesn't allow for differences in geography or time. Do these people all live in the US and only ever buy new games? (Wait....)

Thanks for the kind reception everyone,

I agree it's similar to what happened to Dan. In fact, his article was one of the reasons I wrote mine. I felt there was a larger discourse about the topic and I wanted to weight in. It feels important to do so, specially since it goes against a very heavy concensus on what reviews should look like.

It seems to me that gamers often have poor or strange reactions to game criticism because they are not used to it. The average board gamer hasn't come across analysis beyond "Is this game fun?" and "Is this worth your money?" and hence struggles to understand where criticism comes from. The idea that a game can have political themes or be analyzed like you would with a book still remains foreign to most gamers.

To most boardgamers reviews are about making purchases. They don't know that reviews can talk about history, or cultural contexts because they've never seen it done before. Hence, the idea that price is not an important factor comes across as alien. The first thought that comes to mind is that they are bad reviews, not that they are offering a different perspective because they haven't seen the latter ever before.

Compare it to movies. Most people are aware of high quality, if poshy, movies in black and white that are supposedly very good. They know there's a lot of good ones they haven't seen and there's stuff like Casablanca that everyone agrees is good even if it's old and "nobody" has actually watched it. But in games, people don't have those cultural references. They truly believe The Last of Us is the best game ever made and can't imagine anyone disagreeing.

Not Sure wrote: Measuring that against "similar games at the same price point" is a travesty, and only matters if you're bulk buying. It turns out that I'm not.

There's a very old joke in Spanish about buying "two meters of books" to decorate a living room. Sometimes it doesn't look like a joke.

mc wrote: I also don't understand how such people can't see that putting pricing or commentary on cost doesn't allow for differences in geography or time. Do these people all live in the US and only ever buy new games? (Wait....)

I don't understand it, either. I thought they might just be self-centered but it simply seems they don't consider other countries exist at all. I've gotten quite a few complaints about using euros instead of dollars, the metric system instead of feet and pound and quite a lot about some bit of Spanish text showing up in a game.

Erik Twice wrote: There's a very old joke in Spanish about buying "two meters of books" to decorate a living room. Sometimes it doesn't look like a joke.

The American version would be organizing your books by color. Zoom interviews from home offices and living rooms let us know who’s actually reading their collection.